No one will be surprised to learn that fourteen hundred years ago the Chinese laid down six canons of art. Nothing is more natural than that some great artist, reviewing in old age his life and work, should deduce from the mass of experience and achievement certain propositions, and that these, in time, should become rules, to be preached by pedants, practised by dilettanti, and ignored by every artist worthy of the name. What does surprise us is that the first of these Chinese canons should be nothing less than a definition of that which is essential in all great art. "Rhythmic vitality," Prof. Giles calls it; Mr. Okakura, "the Life-movement of the Spirit through the Rhythm of things"; Mr. Binyon suggests "the fusion of the rhythm of the spirit with the movement of living things." "At any rate," he says, "what is certainly meant is that the artist must pierce beneath the mere aspect of the world to seize and himself to be possessed by that great cosmic rhythm of the spirit which sets the currents of life in motion. We should say in Europe that he must seize the universal in the particular." "The universal in the particular," that is perhaps what the greatest art expresses. Perhaps it is a widespread consciousness of this that produces all great movements; and perhaps the history of their decline and fall is nothing more than a history of its gradual decay and disappearance. Great movements seem to arise when men become aware suddenly that the universe has a soul: the first artists of a movement are the men who perceive most clearly this soul in every part of the universe; they are called Primitives. They are men driven to art by the intolerable necessity of expressing what they feel; they break silence only because they have something to say; and their one object is to say it as completely and intelligibly as possible. Primitives stand in a class by themselves because they have perceived more clearly than others the reality that lies beneath the superficial, and because, having no other end in view, they have expressed it more completely.